JAZZ VIEW

JAZZ VIEW;A Jazz Generation and the Miles Davis Curse

By PETER WATROUS

Published: October 15, 1995

THE ARRIVAL OF THE SAXOPHONIST Wayne Shorter's "High Life," his first recording in seven years, makes jazz fans tremble with fear. Mr. Shorter, 62, is arguably the most influential living jazz composer. Like his peers who inhabit jazz's loftier realms -- Herbie Hancock, Ornette Coleman, Chick Corea, Sonny Rollins -- he has spent the last quarter century flashing bits of his grand talent, then finding the nearest drain down which to dump the rest.

And his "High Life," which will be released on Tuesday, turns out to be a pastel failure and a waste of his enormous talent; it is as if Picasso had given up painting to design greeting cards. Mr. Shorter was a composer who, 30 years ago, brought to jazz an entirely new harmonic vocabulary, one that is still the training ground for young musicians.

High Life" shows none of that vision; simply, it's an eager-to-please instrumental pop album, with only a vestigial relationship to mainstream jazz and virtually no connection to Mr. Shorter's glory years. But it is a fascinating document, one whose esthetic explains much about a generation of musicians and the idiom called fusion, and ultimately about the curse of Miles Davis.

Fusion, which Mr. Shorter helped define, first as part of Miles Davis's group and then as a founder of Weather Report, was a mule idiom, a bastardization of jazz and pop. It was a marriage of funk and black music in Mr. Davis's hands, and rock and world music in those of others. Its first real statement of intent appeared on Mr. Davis's "Filles de Kilimanjaro" (1968), which was notable in its use of electric keyboards. Fusion was meant to be the great black and white hope, and it enabled its practitioners to make money: Mr. Davis and his pianist, Herbie Hancock, had real pop hits.

It would be easy to dismiss what Miles Davis, who died in 1991, wrought as commercialism. (There are plenty of examples of everyone from Mr. Hancock to Mr. Coleman, in print, selling short the jazz tradition that allowed their brilliance to flourish.) Yet the context that produced such abrupt changes of esthetic and sensibility was clearly all powerful. In four years Mr. Davis and his band moved from the acoustic music exemplified by "Live at the Plugged Nickel," a recently released collection of recordings from 1965 that is one of the great examples of group and formal improvisation found in 20th-century music, to the hyper-electric "Bitches Brew" and rock audiences.

But culturally and politically, everything had changed around the musicians during those four years. The Vietnam War dominated the public consciousness. The civil-rights movement, the Chicago Democratic convention, the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.; the list went on.

Rock was in its ascendance and offered plenty of examples of performers making money and being creative at the same time. Jazz musicians, regularly reminded of their music's pre-eminence only 25 years earlier and feeling progressively left out of popular culture's turmoil and excitement, wanted a way back to relevance. In retrospect, the means they chose was shockingly ephemeral.

Jazz audiences had been growing whiter, in an era of intense racial divisions. The vanguard of jazz had abandoned dance-based rhythms and, in so doing, had alienated fans. Early fusion, in its commercialism, was a way to regain jazz's lost audience, particularly black listeners who had drifted away. The appeal of fusion was irresistible, especially when neglect and privation were seemingly the options. Even Duke Ellington toyed with pop music during this time.

While the early attempts at fusion were often musically sophisticated, the music quickly faltered, losing its complexity and experimental vigor, and by the late 1970's it barely existed. Within a handful of years, jazz fusion became a sort of instrumental pop music, using pop's melodic ideas, rhythms, instruments and textures. And with that, a dream vanished; like any mule idiom, it was barren.

BUT LET'S BACK UP. Wayne Shorter may be the most important living jazz musician. His sensibility permeates the work of virtually every musician under the age of 30 playing mainstream jazz, and plenty who are older. In his early work, his improvising -- restrained and precisely colored -- suggests that he completely understood the saxophone tradition from which he sprang. (Oddly, his work on soprano saxophone leads directly to Kenny G.) But his most durable influence has been compositional: he introduced a completely new harmonic vocabulary, one that gave jazz a new sense of languor and urgency.

The recordings Mr. Shorter made between 1964 and 1967 for Blue Note -- "Night Dreamer," "Juju," "Speak No Evil," "The All Seeing Eye," "Adam's Apple" and "Schizophrenia" -- reduce many of today's young musicians to outright exploitation. His compositions are staples of jazz studies -- the perfect practice ground for young musicians exploring ambiguous, postbe-bop harmonies.

While Mr. Shorter was recording masterpieces, Mr. Davis was changing directions. In 1969 he entered the studio to record the sessions that become "Bitches Brew," which sold 500,000 copies. In contrast, Mr. Shorter's albums on Blue Note were selling roughly 5,000 copies.

That year Mr. Davis began touring with his band, opening rock concerts for Santana. He performed at the Isle of Wight Pop Festival, in front of a crowd estimated at 400,000. Only five years earlier, at the peak of his creative energies, he was still often playing three or four sets a night at hole-in-the-wall clubs. Accompanied by Mr. Shorter, Mr. Davis went on to open shows for Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, the Band, Laura Nyro and others. He performed at the home of rock, the Fillmore, and even records a live album there. Mr. Shorter still hadn't led a band in public.

It's impossible to overestimate Mr. Davis's influence, and not just on Mr. Shorter. While Mr. Davis's sidemen and followers may not have taken his precise musical formula, they certainly benefited from the battles he won as the advance guard. The drummer Tony Williams and his group, Lifetime, recorded "Emergency" in 1969. The pianist Joe Zawinal and Mr. Shorter formed Weather Report and released their first fusion album in 1971. That year, the guitarist John McLaughlin formed the Mahavishnu Orchestra. (The name was suggested by his guru, Sri Chinmoy.) Mr. Corea formed Return to Forever in 1972. Two years later, Mr. Shorter recorded "Native Dancer," a Brazilian jazz fusion album, and Herbie Hancock released "Headhunters," which quickly sold half a million copies, reaching No. 13 on Billboard's album chart.

This flurry of activity was noticed by musicians outside Davis's circle. Ornette Coleman hired the avant-garde guitarist James (Blood) Ulmer the same year "Headhunter" is released and issued his first fusion album, "Dancing in Your Head," a year later. In 1973, Joe Henderson recorded a fusion album, "Multiple." All the while, the pop-jazz label CTI Records, founded by the producer Creed Taylor, was taking jazz veterans like Stanley Turrentine, Freddie Hubbard and Milt Jackson into the studio to make some of the worst recordings of their careers.

Clearly, the esthetic success achieved by jazz musicians through years of practice and bandstand battles could be lost; jazz, improvisation and the forward momentum of innovations are muscles that wither when not used. There are few examples of jazz musicians who took an extended break from the music and reappeared playing better. And virtually every important member of the fusion generation has spent time moving between instrumental pop music and mainstream jazz. None of them, whether it be Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock or Wayne Shorter, have ever matched their earlier efforts.

So it has to be imagined: What would jazz look like today if Mr. Shorter, Mr. Hancock, Mr. Corea and others had maintained their nerve and kept moving in the mainstream of jazz, taking on its problems and amplifying their breakthroughs? What would have happened if the innovations of the Miles Davis quintet had been built on instead of abandoned?

One thing is sure. The legions of young people playing jazz now, picking up the broken pieces left by their elders of two generations earlier, sometimes to great effect and sometimes to the point of imitation, would not exist in the form they do today. As good as it is, would one of the best-selling albums of 1991 have been Joe Henderson's acoustic album "Lush Life: The Music of Billy Strayhorn"? Would historicism, instead of progressivism, be the vocabulary of the present?

Mr. Shorter's "High Life," with its reliance on the most obvious pop back beats and its sentimentalism, is quite likely a commercial mistake. The real money nowadays is in acoustic music with intellectual weight. Mr. Henderson, Mr. Shorter's label mate, sold 74,000 copies of "Lush Life." Mr. Shorter's three albums, electric and ostensibly commercial, recorded for Columbia during the 1980's never sold more than 20,000 copies apiece.

Yet that's one of the enduring legacies of Miles Davis: not only did he wipe out the serious aspirations of a generation but when the time is ripe for a Mr. Shorter to return to mainstream jazz, the place of his greatest achievements, he's blind to see it. And he's losing money too.

Photos: Miles Davis, left, and Wayne Shorter, both circa 1975--The jazzfusion movement gathered steam in the early 1970's, with Mr. Davis in the vanguard and Mr. Shorter often at his side. (Illustration by Stephen Kroninger from photographs by David Gahr) (pg. 1); Chick Corea; Tony Williams; Lenny White; Wayne Shorter; Herbie Hancock; Joe Zawinal; John McGlaughlin; Children of Miles -- His sidemen may not have always followed his musical formula, but they benefited from the battles he had won as fusion's advance guard.; Sonny Rollins; Ornette Coleman, Joe Henderson; Gil Evans; George Russell; Cousins of Miles -- Many musicians outside Mr. Davis's circle also pulled away from their mainstream roots to experiment with fusion jazz in 1970's. (Photographs by DAVID GAHR) (pg. 40)